Despite my deep, deep love and adoration for Jonathon Demme, I had for multiple reasons not got around to watching Philadelphia, a film following a court case based in the wrongful firing of Tom Hanks’ Andrew Beckett due to his recent diagnosis of AIDS. I feel my avoidance has been down to many factors, all of which surround the critical opinion of the film. The reputation of emotional manipulation and ‘Oscar bait’ false esteem that the film has received has always turned me away from it, with me always unjustly believing that the film would have been a dilution of Demme’s skills as a very independent and idiosyncratic auteur director. Pile this false assumption on top of the multiple critiques of the film, modern and contemporary, usually more disparaging than praising and you have a film that slinks slowly down your watch list. Legendary gay rights activist and playwright Larry Kramer described the film as “dishonest” and “simply not good enough”, going to comment that it was also “often politically, legally and medically inaccurate”. However I was desperately happy to find a film that in my opinion is a depthful and intriguing portrayal of AIDS stigma, homophobia and ultimately the power of life and the will to survive and fight for human rights. I this humble critic’s opinion Philadelphia is a more than worthy addition to my repeated Demme viewing cannon and behind The Silence of the Lambs and Stop Making Sense, I find that it most likely ranks third.

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All in all I think Philadelphia had a lot of bizarre choices at the heart of its marketing and branding that led it to have such a divided critical opinion in modern parlance. To begin with there is the title which had led to jokes for years amongst inside film circles about how it’s the equivalent of naming a cancer drama set in Delaware; Delaware. The title does strike one initially as an odd choice, but frankly the other titles weren’t any better, with possibilities ranging from the perfectly fine People Like Us, to the shoddy At Risk, to the horrifically bland Probable Cause. It’s a painfully overused phrase but Demme really does here make the city of Philadelphia its own character and the choice of city is not wholly un-purposeful, with the city being both “the city of brotherly love” and the centre of the supposed birth of Justice in America. Making it a perfect, even satirical setting for a story of a court case surrounding a pure act of bigotry. Philadelphia seeps into the bones of the film even more so in the music of it, the films other most remembered factor nowadays, with two songs about the Philadelphian experience of Andrew Beckett (our central dying character played by Hanks). There is of course the Oscar winning Streets of Philadelphia, by Bruce Springsteen, a tremdously powerful track that Demme uses to open to the film and perfectly set the tone of the piece by having it underscore a montage of real citizens acknowledging and waving at the camera. Springsteen was another element in Demme’s plan to bring this film to as wide an audience as possible, with Springsteen’s normal audience not nessecerilly being the type to go see a film about a disease ravaging the gay community. This was similarly Demme’s choice behind getting as many name actors as he could in the feature, something that was criticised as making the film too cliché and Hollywood, but anyone who knows Demme’s work would understand that his goal is a human one and his work anything but Hollywood. The film closes with Neil Young’s devastatingly haunting melancholic ode to the city with the title track; Philadelphia, a beautiful and very subtle piece of music that ends the film perfectly. The film also features a culmination of Demme’s other two masterpieces by having a diagetic performance of the Talking Heads song Heaven performed by Q Lazzarus, the singer of Goodbye Horses from the infamous Buffalo Bill dance scene. This performance is similarly haunting and David Byrne’s lyrics truly bring home the pain and beauty of death as they always have, just this time with a more brutal narrative context.

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The films only other Oscar win was Tom Hanks first for Best Actor, winning his second the following year for Forrest Gump. I frankly believe that this is Hanks best work. As Beckett he runs the gambit of emotions and never once makes the film about his dying, it is instead about his struggle in this case. Although one can make the very justifiable argument that Denzel Washington is the lead of this film with Hanks delivering an all-time Supporting Actor performance, one can seriously not deny the effect that our time with Hanks takes on us. Demme’s camerawork, once again employing the direct extreme close-ups and POV angles that arguably made him a Best Director winner, puts us at times delicately and at other points devastatingly close to the truth of Beckett’s expiericne in a human fashion that I just don’t think many other directors could have achieved. Antonio Banderes stars as Andrew’s lover with a deftness and compassion that fills one with memories of a long relationship, despite us never seeing any of it. A point of contention with the film’s release was the removal of multiple scenes of the pair showing more affection, including one of them talking in bed together. Although these scenes may have more obviously declared the intimacy shared by the couple, I really do believe that they were extraneous and were cut for length and pace purpose over some agenda, afterall the relationship we do have and do see is as I say a touching and effecting one.  Culminating in the film’s haunting final note underscored beautifully and effectively by Neil Young, a slow zoom into the world of a younger Andrew, as we view real life footage from Hanks childhood, through the film's context of a life lost. An image of pure innocence that highlights that the disease can and did effect all manner of people, and all people are children to begin with. Denzel Washington is our other lead here as Joe Miller, the accident lawyer who takes on Beckett’s case when nobody else can. I cannot stress enough just how relieving the character of Joe Miller was in this film. We have seen the story so many times of outrageous bigot comes to befriend a minority through a set of circumstances before realising that his bigotry was wrong the whole time... Big cry scene, or speech.... Bigot defends minority against an even bigger bigot... And then credits roll. Frankly, I’m tired of it. It’s untruthful and is in many ways the sort of story on film that does more harm than good arguably. When a person with homophobic attitudes of  a minor level (let’s say, not that any level is good) and they see a character on screen beating up a gay guy and screaming slurs, they can sit back and go “I’m fine. I’m not that bad”. Washington’s Miller has deep rooted homophobic attitudes from his upbringing as an African-American and all of society beyond his own racial experience. Miller is a real and dimensional character that Nyswater has written with impeccable dialogue and Demme and Washington have brought to the screen with incredible capability for tone and character. Washington is the lead of this film and he is absolutely sensational in it.

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The supporting cast of this film is insanely well stacked it has to be said. One can have a great time playing Demme / Silence of the Lambs bingo when it comes to faces of character actors in absolutely every role and place, along with a Melvin and Howard reunion on the defence team with Mary Steenburgen and Jason Robards (again both dynamic and interesting portrayals of real life villains, thankfully without a moustache twirl insight). One of these Silence familiar faces is Ron Vawter. Demme had to convince TriStar to hire Vawter, due to his own HIV positive status and the effect it would have on the film’s insurance plans for actors. Vawter plays one of the more sympathetic co-workers being accused of the negligent firing, with his scenes bringing a divide once more into the proceedings. Vawter is subtly brilliant in this film and his court scene is just another taut and well-written side to the case. Demme’s goal of hiring HIV positive actors for extras and smaller roles was a key crux of his production, with an often flouted, but often disputed statistic that of the 53 men who appeared in various scenes, 43 had died within the following year. The disputing lies primarily in when the men died and whether “within a year” is accurate, there is no dispute however in Demme’s repeated goal to make this film as effective an AIDS tale as one could make, whilst never once declaring it or marketing it as “the AIDS film”. Demme and his team did base the film in some small part upon the real life lawsuit of AIDS discrimination that came about by Geoffrey Bowers, all in all a very similar case to the fictional Andrew Beckett of this film. Bowers and his family were thanked and paid after the fact, a controversy at the time, but I do feel Demme and Nyswaner’s decision to not go about adapting that story directly and rather instead use the basis of a courtroom drama to bring in many different aspects of the crisis led to a more wholly independent and successful film.

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What I have failed to mention is just how personal this film was to Demme. Spurned by the AIDS diagnosis of his close friend illustrator Juan Suarez Botas, Demme took the critical clout, multiple Oscars and massive box office success of The Silence of the Lambs and made Philadelphia his next project. This combined with the critical opinion from much of the Trans community around the depiction of Buffalo Bill, led to this feature becoming a very pivotal and in many ways personal feature for the director whose humble beginnings have been discussed previously on this blog, and will be gone into more detail about next week. I personally believe that Philadelphia is a stirringly powerful and beautifully made film that should certainly be returned to with a contemporary lens by many critics and audiences, for in the world of modern media with many more fine examples of representation of LGBT and more specifically AIDS based stories, one can remove much of the stigma that has followed Philadelphia since its releasd, with it being for many years unfairly critiqued as The AIDS film. For under it all is a simply tremendous and bold film from a master director who is very sorely missed. I was originally only pencilled in to write 500 words on this as a small segment of next week’s entire Demme rundown, however the film touched me so deeply that I simply had to discuss it more and give it its own article – it really, really does deserve it.

-          - Thomas Carruthers